Teacher isolation is so deeply ingrained in the traditional fabric of schools that leaders cannot simply invite teachers to create a collaborative culture. They must identify and implement specific, strategic interventions that help teachers work together rather than alone. —Richard DuFour

If the goal is quality teaching in all classrooms for the benefit of all students, then it is essential that principals and teacher leaders create a high-performance culture which has professional learning and meaningful teamwork at its core.

The creation and maintenance of such a culture against the forces of entropy require intentional, skillful leadership. It does not happen by accident.

Successful principals and teacher leaders are clear about the attributes of such cultures and take daily actions to promote them.

School communities, like all organizations and individuals, sometimes have difficulty generating and sustaining energy to maintain a collective course of action over many months and years.

For the most part, a school community’s energy and momentum is determined by the energy and momentum of its leaders.

Compelling goalsthat touch the head and heart are essential to sustaining energy, as is strong, interdependent teamwork that generates a stream of continuous actions to achieve those goals.

Well-targeted and well-executed actions, in turn, generate more energy. “Feedback is the breakfast of champions,” someone once observed. That’s particularly true when those actions are followed by an analysis of their effectiveness and appropriate adjustments are made.

Because initiating action is a major challenge for many individuals and groups, Skip Prichard in a blog post offers a number of tips for individuals who are challenged by getting started, among the most important of which is:

“Stop, get up, and do it. Turn yourself into a doer. A doer is someone who has an idea and moves forward with it immediately. Have you ever said to anyone, “It is a great day to go to the beach,” and then sat around and watched TV? Next time stop, get up, and go do it. Do you want to begin exercising or present a new idea at work? Do it today. When we pause and wait, we lose the will to move forward and allow doubt to creep into our minds.”

Pritchard concludes: “The simple truth is that one average idea put into action is far more valuable than 20 genius ideas that are being saved for some other day or the right time. When you have an idea or make a decision, get into the habit of taking action.”

What methods do you use to initiate and sustain goal-directed action over time?

Instead of inviting teachers to watch one another teach, to debate best classroom practices, and to pool resources, the school culture walls them off and parcels out their time. It actually promotes professional distance. —Mary Ann Smith

Meaningful collaboration will not occur unless administrators and teacher leaders address common structural barriers such as lack of:

• time,

• meeting space conducive to extended conversation,

• data and other forms of evidence to use in making decisions and assessing progress toward goals, and

• skillful facilitation of team meetings.

Common cultural barriers to successful collaboration include:

• confusion about important goals and methods of achieving them,

• a lack of focus and motivation regarding those goals and methods,

• the absence of shared beliefs regarding students’ ability and the school’s capacity to achieve those goals, and

• low levels of interpersonal trust among educators.

What structures and attributes of school culture have proven essential in overcoming professional isolation in your setting?

Building an improved professional culture is possible by developing teachers’ capacities to work with teacher teams on shared beliefs, academic focus, and productive relationships. — Jon Saphier, Matt King, & John D’Auria

Jon Saphier and colleagues have condensed a great deal of meaning into one sentence.

Administrators and teacher leaders have a fundamental responsibility to create a professional culture that continuously improves teaching and learning for the benefit of all students and ensures that all members of the school community — students, parents, teachers, and administrators — are surrounded by supportive relationships. Culture building is a challenging and never-ending task that cannot be delegated nor ignored.

Leadership and teaching practices are shaped and sometimes determined by shared beliefs about students’ capacity for learning and teachers’ ability to successfully teach them.

The primary means of continuous improvement is strong teamwork founded on trusting, productive relationships. Those relationships require constant tending to avoid the decline that is inevitable if they are ignored.

Strong teamwork is the engine that enables continuous improvements in teaching and learning.

High-functioning teams have compelling, stretching goals that require sustained, meaningful collaboration for their achievement. They also have sufficient time to meet and skillful leadership that promotes both the attainment of goals and trusting relationships. (I elaborate here on the qualities of effective teams.)

High-functioning teams also demonstrate the “total radical transparency” that director James Cameron describes in a September 2014 Fast Company interview in which he discusses the development of a submersible vehicle for his documentary, “James Cameron’s Deepest Challenge 3-D”:

The process I used was called “total radical transparency.” Everyone working on the vehicle had to sit around the table every morning at 8:15 – not 8:14 or 8:16 – and we’d air out our problems. There would be no offline conversations about things that were going wrong. You bring your problems to the group, and we as a group would solve them. People thought I was crazy, but after about two weeks, we started really working as a team. They started to understand that you don’t hide your problems – you bring your problems to the group.

Instead of hiding problems, members of teaching and leadership teams bring them to the group, which is the ultimate test of high-functioning teams and a prerequisite for the achievement of the compelling goals that guide and motivate their work.

What is your experience working with or on teams that manifest “total radical transparency”?

Whether learners are 5 years old or 50, it is essential that their talk and active engagement in the “doing” dominate both K-12 classrooms and professional development experiences rather than the voice of the teacher or “presenter.”

So, for instance, if we wish educators to become better planners, analyzers of research, and collaborators, it simply makes sense that they be provided with generous amounts of time to learn about and practice those skills during the initial learning and receive continuing feedback as they apply those skills in their job settings.

Likewise, educators’ professional judgment is strengthened when they:

• have extended opportunities to apply and refine their judgement as they grapple with meaningful problems of practice in sustained conversations with colleagues, and

• explore evidence related to the real-world consequences of their decisions.

What methods have you used or experienced that promote professional learning through doing?